Asking Charlie Mangulda, the Last Speaker of Amurdak, to overdub his performance from the sacred site of Mt. Borradale, was one of the most complex and unnerving directorial moves—to me, not to him—I’ve ever had to do. John Tranter, our local sound guy, is just a dynamite practitioner. But recording Charlie’s voice, two, cracking clapstick players, and a bulbous didgeridoo on a cave’s platform under an ancient painting of a Rainbow Serpent, proved to be too much for our top-of-the-line digital equipment. This poem tells the story. I won’t repeat it. I won’t even tell you what Ma barang! means, I’m sure you already know. And if you don’t know, then you really do already know.

What I do want to talk about, briefly, is the opening lines. In Amurdak, Charlie’s language, is one of the very few instances where you can actually see a difference in consciousnesses between languages. The idea that some languages are more primitive than others is simply cultural prejudice: you can say anything in any language, and every language has a full syntax and grammatology. But in Amurdak, Charlie doesn’t know his left from his right. This concept, which until the 1960s was thought to be universal, actually doesn’t exist in a few languages. The way Charlie designates direction is simply and solely through cardinal directions. And it’s been shown that it doesn’t matter where speakers of these languages are placed, they are automatically oriented to the compass points, so that they can say of the choices, “I’ll take the one on the southwest.”

Now, you could infer from this that Amurdak people don’t see themselves, each one, as the center of the universe, where left and right is always and only consistent to the person speaking. Instead, the Amurdak people—or in this case, Charlie, the Last Speaker—is simply a point standing somewhere on Earth. But that’s just an inference. Or maybe a poem.

One more thing before we close. When Charlie was translating the creation myth of Warramurrungunji, he listed the dozen or so languages that the Goddess dropped, thus bringing humans to the place she had created. Somehow, under the disturbing lights of the camera, with the intrusion of the microphone, Charlie remembered three words of a language that linguist Nick Evans, an expert on cultures of Northern Australia, didn’t know he could speak. And when Charlie mentioned Wurdirrk and gave Nick some words, it was the first time that this language has ever been recorded. That’s correct. I think this was The Apotheosis of the whole shoot of “Language Matters.” I could see the headline in the Times: Documentary Crew Discovers Lost Language.

The words Charlie spoke translate to: “I want to listen to you,” “yam-digging tool,” and “give me fire.” The first thing that was apparent to Nick from these three words is that they are unlike any other language, which means Wurdirrk is not a dialect—without these words, we never would have known that.

As a poet, I’d like to say one more thing about the words. If you triangulate from them, what you have is a whole culture. “I want to listen to you,” the essence of the community. “Yam-digging tool,” the basis of the community’s relationship with the earth and it also means “digging deeply into the meaning of something.” And “give me fire,” the essence of light, of heat, a great song title, and the best joke in the book.

For “gimme fire,” I envisioned Charlie as a little boy, these strange people coming out of the darkness late at night, shivering and cold, needing some of this precious fire for light and heat. Later, Charlie would give me the deeper meaning of this idiom. Hey buddy, you got a match?

New Age mystics. Wave-particle physics.Federico Garcia Lorca, that all-night talker.The law. The rot inside the apple core.All dawdlers. Power walkers. Tattooparlours. Death metal concerts.Poetry readings that go on for hours.Cigarettes. White-singleted men in bedsits.Responsibilities. Provincial cities.Representation on committees.Bad sex. Rainforest decks. Sunday best.Other people’s crises. Lychees. Wasteof breath. At all costs, avoid death.Too much sun. Too much of one thing.Wagner’s Ring. Paintings of cows at eventide.Cows in formaldehyde. Sentimentalityand cynicism. Literary criticism. Impartiality.Anyone with a knife. The good life.

On that note, I’ll conclude this 15 week Tiki Tour of New Zealand poetry—a rare opportunity to redirect some literary traffic eastwards, back across the Pacific. American voices have been heard in New Zealand for decades now—and their influence is everywhere to be felt in our contemporary poetry. Yet most American readers and writers don’t know much at all about New Zealand and its poetry. (A rare exception: Robert Creeley married a girl from Dunedin and used to drop by nearly often enough for us to claim him as a New Zealand poet.) For anyone wanting to explore antipodean poetry a little further, a good starting place is the ‘Best New Zealand Poetry’ website (administered by Chris Price and the Institute of Modern Letters)—an annual on-line publication inspired by the ‘Best American Poetry’ anthologies: http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/iiml/bestnzpoems/index.htmlThe site features such indispensable poets as James K. Baxter, Allen Curnow, Ian Wedde, Janet Frame, C. K. Stead, Keri Hulme, Geoff Cochrane, Kate Camp, Ashleigh Young and virtually all of the NZ poets featured on the present site over the past 15 weeks.

Among the anthologies in print, I can wholeheartedly recommend Twenty Contemporary New Zealand Poets, ed. Andrew Johnston and Robyn Marsack (VUP & Carcanet, UK, 2008) and The best of the best New Zealand Poems (ed. Bill Manhire and Damien Wilkins, VUP 2012). For a wider view of the nation’s literature, the 1200 page compendium The AUP Anthology of New Zealand Literature (ed. Jane Stafford and Mark Williams, 2012) is—remarkably, given its size—sparky, enticing, energising and brilliant. Also worth a close look: Essential New Zealand Poems (ed. Siobhan Harvey, Harry Ricketts and James Norcliffe), 99 ways into New Zealand poetry (ed. Harry Ricketts and Paula Green), the periodicals Landfall, Sport, Hue & Cry, and the on-line journals: trout (http://www.trout.auckland.ac.nz/) and turbine (http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/iiml/turbine/Turbi13/index.html). Many thanks to all the poets and publishers who have helped present this sampler over the past three months.

Gregory O'Brien

~

Having reached the end of my 15-week stint without including any prose poetry, I would like to make mention of a genre which is in particularly good health here in the antipodes. Interested persons should seek out the work of Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle, Airini Beautrais, James MccNaughton, Aleksandra Lane, Cilla McQueen, Anne Kennedy, Michael Harlow and Richard von Sturmer, to name a few. I can’t resist adding (alongside a photograph by Victoria Birkinshaw) the following prose-poem by Rachel O’Neill (from One Human in Height, Hue & Cry Press 2013):

Closer and closer

She is a parachutist and for her own reasons approaches her family reunion from above. Falling, she spies a young girl who looks cool, dressed in fluorescent pink bike shorts, hair tied up with a scrunchie, which is a sort of mini deflated parachute for the head. It’s a sign that I’m landing in the middle of the right reunion, the parachutist thinks. Also she can see a group near a smoky BBQ, waving. The parachutist can’t yet confirm that she’s landing in the midst of the right people but she likes the look of them, the way they’re starting to part a little so that she can land safely amongst them. Please, let them be my family, she thinks, because whoever they are, they’re getting closer and closer.

September 21, 2014

The launching in Auckland this week of a major anthology of Maori poetry (in English) is cause for celebration and, hopefully, vigorous discussion. In their 400 page compendium, editors Reina Whaitiri and Robert Sullivan have surveyed a rich, wide-ranging, lyrical, often politicised and much mythologised poetic landscape. Purposeful, sometimes argumentative, and nearly always bedrocked in immediate experience, Maori poetry--as portrayed here--keeps returning to fundamental relationships: between individuals, family, community, tribe and nation. The book contains laments and valedictions, ancestral meditations, conversations with mythical figures and, tellingly, a number of poems addressing the greatest Maori poet to date, Hone Tuwhare (1922--2008). 'Through language and ideas, through stories and shared experiences, we discover and rediscover what it is to be Maori,' the editors state in their introduction. 'Te korero te kai a te rangatira---and may we continue to be well fed.'

Haiku (1)

Stopyour snivellingcreek­bed:

come rain hailand flood­water

laugh again

(Hone Tuwhare, 1970)

~

Restoring the ancestral house

Old walls creakamid mason­bee humthrough cracked timbers

sun splinters ricochet fromthe one good eyeof the tekoteko

supine upon the floor

And I . . .ladder perchedhand poised tentatively

to trace aged scrollsof clays blue­black and white and kōkōwaiadornments on the ribs ofthe ancestral house

The shadows moveand the house is fullgrey mounds humped upon the whāriki

sleepinga child slurps upon his mother’s nipplein the corner

muffled lover shufflingsand the old men snoring

But only spiderspeople the housetheyand the marauding mason­beeare the spinners of talesand the long night singingno childno loversand the old men starefaded photographsmorose in their warped framesdrunk against the wall

And I . . .ladder shakingand shiny acrylicand cement for the dry rotin the tekoteko’s back.

(Katerina Mataira, 1996)

~

For my father in prison, 1965

Doing time my father would have needed time to do this

To build a table made from matchsticks, our only family heirloom

Matchstick upon matchstick held together with some kind of glue

Just like the brick building which held him

Yes, that’s it stone upon black stone which kept him captive

He entered through the heavily bolted steel door they held open

And when he emerged he had a matchstick table and was very quiet

Each matchstick represented a fragment of his life

Each fragment was there outside him, set in a glue and he was a shell

(Michael O'Leary, 1985)

~

Honda waka

Today I surrendered the lifeof my Honda Cityto a wrecker in Penrose for $30.

I bought it seven years ago for $6000.It has rust in the lower sills,rust around the side windows –on the WOF inspection sheet it says:‘this car has bad and a lot of rust . . .’

That car took me to Uncle Pat’s tangi in Bluff.We stopped and gazed at Moeraki,the dream sky, on the way.

A friend followed us in it on the wayto National Women’s for Temuera’s birth(we were in her huge Citroen).We went to Ōtaki, and Wellington,in the Honda to visit family.

The Honda took me to Library Schoolperched next to Victoria Uni.

I drove Grandad across the creek in the Honda

at night after the family reunion bash.

Temuera’s first car seat was in the Honda.That Honda has seen a high percentage

of my poetry.Now I have left it behind.

(Robert Sullivan, from the sequence 'Star Waka', 1999)

Puna Wai Korero is published by Auckland University Press. Details and further poems from the anthology: http://www.press.auckland.ac.nz/en/browse-books/all-books/books-2014/puna-wai-k_rero--an-anthology-of-mori-poetry-in-english.html

Current New Zealand Poet Laureate, Vincent O’Sullivan is author of two novels, a biography of writer John Mulgan, and numerous collections of stories and poetry. He is also a playwright and, not surprisingly, his verse is often theatrical in its use of personae and dialogue, its dramatic entrances and exits. ‘Always on the cards’—which unfolds like a dramatic monologue—is from O’Sullivan’s latest collection Us, then (Victoria University Press 2013). As well as dissecting family and social relationships, O’Sullivan’s poems have a rare capacity to take on fads and lapses in the national character. Notably in this regard, his latest book includes a meditation on director Peter Jackson’s filmic recasting of New Zealand as Middle Earth. In the ensuing kitsch-fest, The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit have been subsumed holus-bolus into the popular national self-image, aided and enthusiastically abetted by the tourism board and a score of souvenir-touting operators. O’Sullivan’s observations on the present state of cultural confusion are worth quoting in full:

This time in 3-D

The usual spilling of ten thousandorcs, the magic swords, dismemberedstacks, a warg’s head bouncing the SouthernAlps. A grey unspeakably boring wizard

making his Baden-Powell speeches on keepingorder in the Shire, serving the causeof peaceable hobbits and shining, pure-fabricked, waterfall-elegant elves.

I yearn for a piece of human flesh stabbingthe dear life at another piece. I want usas we’ve always been. I want Realityfor God’s sake, the way it was trickily made!

Author of eight collections of poetry, Michele Leggott (born in Stratford, Taranaki, in 1956) is a Professor of English at the University of Auckland, from where she co-ordinates the New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre (http://www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz). A graduate of the University of British Columbia, Leggott wrote her PhD on the poetry of Louis Zukovsky (her dissertation was subsequently published as Reading Zukofsky’s "80 Flowers" in 1989). Leggott's poetry, since the 1980s, has been shaped by an intense scrutiny of Zukofsky and other recent North American poets, and by her later immersion in the work of pioneering generations of New Zealand woman poets such as Robin Hyde, Mary Stanley and Eileen Duggan. Her writing has retained the kind of taut, allusive musicality which would have appealed to Zukofsky while adopting, increasingly, the personal register and lyricism of Hyde and others. Teeming with incidents and details from the life of the mind, self and family (past and present), Leggott's poems are like preludes and fugues played upon the surfaces of the everyday.

'slow reader' is from her 2009 collection, Mirabile Dictu. Her most recent collection, Heartland, appeared from Auckland University Press this year.

Further information:http://www.bookcouncil.org.nz/writers/leggott.html

Born in 1958, Tom Weston is a poet, solicitor and, most recently, a judge. In the latter capacity, he has served around the islands of the South Pacific as well as in Christchurch, where he lives (and where he remained during and after the devastation of the 2010 and 2011 earthquakes). Weston has published four poetry collections, of which The Ambigious Companion (1996) and Naming the Mind Like Trees (2004) are illustrated by one of Australasia's most inventive painters, Joanna Braithwaite. 'The old dog' is taken from his most recent book, Only one question (Steele Roberts, 2014)—a collection of poems which, he says, 'came into existence pre-earthquake but have been shaped and moulded post-earthquake'. Bearing in mind his profession, Weston's judgements on the world are commendably open-ended, elliptical and never tautological. With their many registers of voice (supplied by a lively cast of walk-on characters), the poems occupy a social space—equal parts courtroom, suburban street corner, outrigger canoe and drawing room facing the Southern Alps.

further information about Tom Weston: http://www.bookcouncil.org.nz/Writers/Profiles/Weston,%20Tom

August 17, 2014

In the language of the futuretoday will always be todayand the moments will sparkle like bearings.There will always be enough timeto get things donebecause there will always beenough hours in the day.Countries will be divided upinto hexagons, and every hexagonwill be occupied bya new idea. Everywherewill be connected directlywith everywhere elseby the infallible lawsof perspective.Straight lines will flowinto straight linesacross the golden fields,across the golden fields meltinginto the golden cities.Gold will grow on vines.In the future, language will alsogrow on a vine, and everything we saywill be understood. Peoplewill be able to speak their minds,so that the world will seemat first astonishingand then strangely quiet. Some will beginto choose their words carefully, but mostwill come to regard communicationwith a lengthening suspicion, so that eventuallythe sounds themselveswill be granted independence—and then held accountable.As such, in the language of the futurethe revelations of the new freedomswill be the property of everyoneand nobody.Breasts will become auniversal validating standardand fat peoplewill be made illegal. Carswill finally be included inthe Bill of Rightsand granted protection frompedestriansand other forms ofvisual pollution.The emancipation of signswill be the speed of change.For in the future, brain retention will decreasebut thought-count will expand,so that poking out one’s tonguewill be just the tipof the iceberg.And although the space separating wordsfrom everything elsewill have ceased to be, research will continueand a distant descendant of Henry Jameswill discover a way of measuring exactlythe spaces between words.Mapping will begin, and the first settlerswill arrive and gaze straight throughall that lies before themintowhatever will be.With the new discoveriesthe insides of languagewill be found to be made up oftrillions of interconnecting spheres.Thus, the insides of many thingswill come to be similarlyconstructed, so that when a maninserts his opinioninto a woman, her insides toowill glisten with spheres, which will whirrand retract and increase slightlyin temperature. Teenagers courting in parents’ carswill no longer do donuts, but will do spheres,and, as the verbs decline, their rear-vision mirrorswill display the pastlike kinetic sculpture.Babies will start to be born with wheels,making it easierto get around.Within the language of the futureeverything will be differentand instantly recognisable.We will touch our golden bodies togetherand they will touch their golden bodiestogether, and so on and so on.But there will still be the storiesfor we will always have the needto be guided by voices. ‘Listen,’ they already whisper,‘under the bushes, under the stars,a cool hand talks silently, love …’

James Brown

Anyone called James Brown growing up anywhere in the Western World during the 1970s was going to inherit a raft of high expectations, not to mention creative hurdles. The poetry of Palmerston North-born James Brown has risen well above this challenge. His writing is characterised by its infectious beats, rampant futurism (much in evidence in 'The Language...') and a brisk, heady handling of the lyric mode. All of which has led one critic of New Zealand literature to describe James Brown as 'The James Brown of New Zealand poetry'. Blessed with an intelligent and colourful family, a trusted mountain bike and a wide-ranging intelligence, he offers a distinctive brand of linguistic High Life, delivered in a manner that is usually droll and ironically self-regarding. The New Zealand James Brown (born 1966) knows how to work the crowd but, most of the time, opts for a far subtler routine.

James Brown's most recent collections are Favourite Monsters (2002), The Year of the Bicycle (2006) and Warm Auditorium (2012) all from Victoria University Press. Further details and links to other poems: http://www.bookcouncil.org.nz/writers/brownjames.html

August 10, 2014

Since David Eggleton's 'Painting Mount Taranaki' first appeared in the The Penguin Book of New Zealand Poetry in 1985, it has been one of the most discussed and deconstructed poems in the country's literary history. The poem is a meditation on Mount Taranaki (formerly known as Mount Egmont)--a Mount Fuji-like pyramidal volcano in the North Island, popularised on teatowels, biscuit tins and postcards for well over a century. Eggleton's poem is revisionist in character and volcanic in its gusto; it takes the reader on a break-neck tour of the farming province that wraps around three sides of the iconic mountain. Channeling Allen Ginsberg's 'Howl', the poem sweeps up ancient history, colonialism, consumerism and mass culture in a blaze of surreal observation and soulful invocation. While William Wordworth also figures in the pre-history of this poem, Eggleton's emotions are never quite 'recollected in tranquility'--his poems tend to be hyperactive, satirical and with equal parts euphoria and righteous anger.

‘Painting Mount Taranaki’

Mainly I was led to them, the casinos of aluminium,by the gift of eyebright, whose hollow core containeda vision of the coast and on it the cone shape,like a pile of drenched wheat, of Mount Taranaki.In a world covered in silica andchucked-up alkathene, fibrolite, aluminiumit is just a peak surrounded on three sides by water.For the Soviets, holding down a floorof the Los Angeles Hilton is a forbiddenprogression of the open society.So, to the French, whose own symbol is an ageing Brigitte Bardot,the mountain, just the same,could be a logo for the butter they’ve no-noed,dismissing a country’s living tannery with a sniff:the hides of rain-slicked cows only acceptablein the corner of a page by Frank Sargeson.Corrupt innocence, a young brain, prodded Techtones,featureless Features, a shot Texan burgerbar,the list is endless but not one story seems completeon its own, even tying up the numbered dots provesless efficient than you might at first thinkand, anyway, this absurd reductionist format is onewhich can only begin to hint at the complexunderlying reality.Gossamer threads in air, truck belting down the drive,irresistible wind urging on the silver mist threadsover the split, cheap graves and into green Norfolk pines.During the Vietnam War Against Imperialist AggressionI was schooled in classrooms near Mangere International Airportas venerable millennium temples blew intomillions of fragments in lovely orange and blacknegatives—in a variation on a themea close study of the status of stainless, chrome, plasticsuperheroes revealed wild discrepancies.Over the various eye-witness accountswhirred the blades of gunships trailing and corpsessurfed by on an extravaganza of black Coke.Later, as I put down another batch of jungle juice,I began to learn that Man cannot liveon home-baked bread and granola alone.So much up, I moved closer under the mountainuntil I stood inside a convention of car dealersin an Inglewood hotel.Young and hopelessly flippant, I feltI should be in an environment where it was easierto make a buck and people were more understandingabout ‘in’ references to tribal totems.I swan-dived through the sex shops of Wellington,reaching towards vibrators in a glass case, onlyto catch onto a picnic papercup then an electrified fenceas it threw the other wayon an elliptical approach towards the majesticfunereal mountain that figures at the violet centreof the windscreen first dotted before being lacedby the rain caught in the drum-machine motion of Jupiter,spearing the side of a punga with a flaming asteroid,the cosmos being full of Hau-hau vistas.In the snowstorm black-visored Samurai rode onhornet-yellow Yamahas past a chipped, white,enamel basin on a window ledge,a plant trained to crawl up that same window,the richly decayed caskets of autowreckers’ yards,the tea kiosks of tourist stopsand up the winter volcano to the extinct lip.From ash to dove to puce to brandythe undersea turbines smashed the tintsof the glassy waves into sloppy froth and stiff whites.A litany of rejects from dye vats,the unwanted energy of their beauty decorated the feetof the giant for whom the many Victorian explorersalso left souvenirs.A string tie, cedarwood fan, lace-edged cambric,saddlestrap, sherry glass, wristwatch, nightgown, velvet ribbon.In the centre of ferns they were given backthe ghost images of sedated depressives in the foetal position.As I scrubcut my way around a backblock wildernessas unknown as Europe it was I who began to crack not it.The mountain ‘Egmont’ rained down its ciphers as I sleptuntil I entered the psychologically tropic worldof heat and fever, lava village of the last upthrust.Dealing with the giggling mountain, walking it,you felt you had seen one of the quadrants,fundament and crotch scoredbetween the arched legs of the world.This province began to experience happenings.A two-headed calf was born at Stratford,at Bell Block at evening an old-age pensionerhung himself by his shoelaces in a Corporation bus,Dow Chemical Plant mutated into a radioactive centre,firing out supernovae.Sacred sites became fictions and sensitised scrapsof computer card in plastic envelopes were irrevocablydrawn into the throbbing whirlpool of events.A drudge in a hotel kitchen cornered the marketin replicas of credit cards by fabricating a deceptionwhich played on the public’s mounting fears of eruption.His prolific operation soon saw him zoomingto the top of the money tree.Bizarre mission for a steamy morning, huntingthrough the underbelly’s growth canopyfor signs of the tribe as showers sweep downand a rackety V8 is driven from undera dilapidated carport overhang with the rain seeping in,the tribe collapsed like a rusty barbed-wire fencein front of a wedding-cake house with soft pink icingspelling out blushes and little tears of joyin the happy hour.Scrawny wetas skipping across cushions of green mosson fallen old totaras. Neat, eh, to seeragwort, cocksfoot, fennel, catmint growinground a shagged dinghy on a rusted cradle traileras wraiths ascend supplejack and the beekeeperis rooted to the spot with a curse.And now with the art that goes through daily lifethe fundamentalist preacher, like a page of old history,speckled, damp with mildew spots,his Brylcreemed waffle of hair catching the morning sun,walks in the foreground of cones of gravel,central and terminal.Stained stacks of Truth newspaper in the skew-whiff shedadjacent to the off-balance dunny.In the wool shearers’ abandoned quartersa few stained, bloody mattresses, stuffed with kapok,have burst.Cherubim perch on the shingle, ice-creamtypes of gentlemen swing their partnerslike candyfloss in a spin.A bruised young mother,with her mother in a trouser suitand upswept wings of punished hair,recalls knitting needles of the circle clickinglike train wheelsin the pink-wafer light that reminiscing imposes.Quattrocento fanatics didn’t have it like this.From them we borrowed cardinal red and pageboy hairstyles,our larders and pantries stuffed with wholemeal loaveson the rise, in ferment.Beans swelling, sprouting out of their jars.Nuts pouring from plastic sacks.The stillness leads on into a chapel hush.Grated carrot bristles.The dinner guests shrunkback from the gurgling wine like tarnished coinsthrown into a pocketthe questing forefinger seeks.A Model-T Ford car hulk plantedin front of the mind like a zombie chariot before the cult of skis.A battery of childrenwinding in a crocodile, candles aloft,their seed teeth bared at the effort of the pilgrimage.Those ropey arms and flayed legs are notstarved of sensation nor the sharp black/whiteas the light snaps on.Don’t knock yourself out,Taranaki will be there in the morning,the snow a gunky white blob of brilliantine,an ornament, a gargoyle for Bat-Stud.The town hall, pub, gymnasium, and squash court clusterbelow, everything we have learnt reduces to a searchfor the pyramid they burned down.

David Eggleton

Of Fijian and European descent, David Eggleton was born in Auckland in 1952. During the 1980s he was known, both in New Zealand and on the international performance poetry circuit, as the 'Mad Kiwi Ranter'--and it was in that guise he was named 1985 Street Entertainer of the Year by London's Time Out magazine. As well as publishing numerous collections of poetry and a history of New Zealand rock music, he has written the best book to date on New Zealand photography, Into the Light (Craig Potton Publishing 2006). He is currently editor of the literary journal Landfall and the online 'Landfall Review' (see http://www.otago.ac.nz/press/landfall/currentissue.html)

Further information http://www.bookcouncil.org.nz/writers/eggleton.html

August 04, 2014

On crossing the border, I alwayschange my name. A simple precaution& you to guard my back Maheno, MonteCristo, Waianakarua, Mt Misery & allthe wildflowers I am heavy with loot& disappointment, heading south againdown the soft underbelly of the island,shedding skins like coke cans on the Kilmog& already the rain.

ii.

You are waiting, with or withoutmy blessing, in a blue room of picturestorn from magazines: Mother Teresa, Athena'ssandaled Victory, a sequoia forest, an avocadopear, gazelles, two babies in a bath with a chimp,Ayers Rock by sunset, Hare Krishnasin their old gold, mud pools, a street kid. You havea bruise on your cheek.

iii.

'Sit down & I'll tell you a story.

At Moeraki in the old days lived a prophet,Kiri Mahi Nahina, who taught all the peoplethat Tiki had made them, not Io. Te Wera, the warrior,struck him down with his taiaha. Plugged his eyes,ears, nose, mouth, anus with moss to containthe heresy. Then he & his warriors ate him.'

iv.

Nothing is high, nothing is low, nothingis hidden. This is the song, Miriama, you sing,doublestopping on my heart strings.

Bernadette Hall

Written with characteristic amounts of both tenderness and toughness, Bernadette Hall's 'miriama' is a paean to friendship, going places together and shared history. While postcard-like fragments of memory and past events hint at darker realities, it is the intimacy and lyricism of the poem's voice that prevail--the writer and Miriama in heartfeld conversation. As Vincent O'Sullivan has written, Hall's poems are 'the work of a questing, generous, civilised mind, one that quite knows what its values are, and that says so in ways that are definingly unique'. Born in Alexandra, Central Otago, in 1945, Bernadette Hall lives at Amberley Beach, just north of Christchurch. A graduate in classics from Otago University, she is also a playwright, editor and has produced memorable collaborations with visual artist Kathryn Madill. Since the publication in 2004 of The Merino Princess; selected poems (from which 'miriama' is taken), she has produced The Ponies (2007), The Lustre Jug (2009) and Life & Customs (2013), all from Victoria University Press.

July 27, 2014

Who am I? What am I doing herealone with 3000 sheep? I'mturning their bones into grass. LaterI'll turn grass back into sheep.I buy only the old and the lame.They eat anything--bush, bracken, gorse.Dead, they melt into one green fleece.

Who am I? I know the Lord's my shepherdas I am theirs--but thisis the nineteenth century; Darwinis God's First Mate. I must keepmy own log, full of facts if not love.I own 10,000 acres and one dark lake.On the seventh day those jaws don't stop.

Who am I? I am the one sheepthat must not get lost. SoI name names--rocks, flowers, fish:knowing this place I learn to know myself.I survive. The land becomesmy meat and tallow. I light my own lamps.I hold back the dark with the blood of my lambs.

Peter Bland

In 'Beginnings' Peter Bland revisits the life of an important colonial figure, W. H. Guthrie-Smith (1862-1940), who settled in New Zealand as a young man and leased a massive sheep-station called Tutira in the Hawkes Bay region. In 1921 Guthrie-Smith published Tutira--the story of a New Zealand sheep station, which went on to become a classic of New Zealand literature. Bland uses the figure of Guthrie-Smith to make some wry remarks about the changing face of 19th century New Zealand with its new covenant of Christianity, enlightened thinking, taxonomy and sheep-farming. (For much of the 20th century, the nation boasted about having ten sheep for every human inhabitant.).

Peter Bland was born in North Yorkshire, England, in 1934. Arriving in Wellington, aged 20, he studied at Victoria University; during the 1950s and 60s he was a key figure, with James K. Baxter, Alistair Campbell and Louis Johnson, in the Wellington Group. Since the 1970s, he has oscillated between Northern and Southern Hemispheres--and is presently based in Auckland. Not surprisingly, given the geographical shifts of his adult life, he continues to cast an incisive writerly eye over such matters as immigration, the expatriate condition and cultural identity, all handled with his characteristic wit, fellow feeling and tenderness (the latter quality is also much in evidence in his many poems about family). 'Beginnings' was included in Bland's Selected Poems (Carcanet, UK, 1998) and also appeared in his Collected Poems (Steele Roberts, NZ, 2012); his two most recent collections of poetry are Breath Dances (2013) and Hunting Elephants (2014). Peter Bland is also well known as a theatre and film actor in both New Zealand and England.

New Zealand poetry has often engaged with the ocean--not surprisingly given that only one seventeenth of New Zealand is made up of dry land; the remainder of the nation's territory has the waters of the Pacific Ocean and Tasman Sea washing over it. While sea-poems tend to be soulful, often turbulent, excursions into the natural world and the human condition, Elizabeth Smither's 'The sea question' renegotiates the human/marine relationship. The lightness and lyricism of her imagined exchange has few precursors in New Zealand littoral poetry. With humanity laid out on a 'long couch' being counselled by the ocean, the poem acknowledges the sea not only as a natural resouce but also as a repository of wisdom. Maybe the ocean can restore humanity's well-being, if only we listen to what it has to say? Born in 1941, Elizabeth Smither lives in New Plymouth, in a small house looking out across the Tasman. Her poems are precise, exquisite miniatures--they bring to mind the vignettes of Elizabethan painter Nicholas Hilliard or the lute-songs of John Dowland. In their capacity to be, at once, heartfelt and oblique, they hark back to one of her favourite poets, Emily Dickinson. Elizabeth Smither's selected poems, The Tudor Style, was published in 1993; her most recent collection is The Blue Coat (Auckland University Press 2013). She has also published novels, short stories and non-fiction, all in the 'Elizabethan' manner.

Further information: www.bookcouncil.org.nz/writers/smitherelizabeth.html

Spilled cream or cordial a day later.This is the face of an old man held in his own hands.The floor is so cold it could be old cocoa.

This is a naked man trying to squata naked man trying to get up from squatting.This is people gathered, beast-like,their bent heads have leaves for ears.

Hinemoana Baker

Born in 1968, Hinemoana Baker is a prodigiously gifted singer/songwriter/poet of Maori and European descent. Written in memory of a family member, ‘Burial’ draws its almost calligraphic imagery from Colin McCahon's littoral painting Walk (Series C) (1973)--a frieze-like evocation of Muriwai Beach, near Auckland. McCahon's painting, accompanied by some responses by other New Zealand poets, can be found here: http://arts.tepapa.govt.nz/on-the-wall/walk-with-me. The final line of Baker's poem alludes to the Maori tradition whereby the family of the deceased wear tightly woven wreaths of kawakawa leaves around their heads. She has made numerous recordings and written three collections of poetry, most recently waha / mouth (Victoria University Press, 2014)--further information go here. Her first collection, matuhi / needle (co-published in the United States by actor Viggo Mortensen’s Perceval Press in 2004) contains one of the most succinct sporting poems ever written in New Zealand:

Referee

he needs to let the game gohe needs to go back to Townsvillehe needs to know we didn’t drive seven hoursto listen to him play his whistle.

'Juliet' is from Andrew Johnston's most recent book, Do You Read Me? (2013), a collaboration with typographer/artist Sarah Maxey. Comprising 26 poems with accompanying pictures, one for each of the alphabet call signs, the collection offers an inventive and sonorous ensemble of colour-bands, sound-waves, patterns of thought and voice. It also contains a memorable meditation on that dubious New Zealand invention from the 1980s, the bungee: 'It was on the bungee jump / I was introduced to / the art of oscillation / ... it was on the bungee jump / my smile became a frown.'

Born 1963, in Upper Hutt, New Zealand, Andrew Johnston has lived in France since 1997. He has published five collections of poetry and, in 2009, co-edited with Robyn Marsack Twenty Contemporary New Zealand Poems (Carcanet/Victoria University Press). In 2004 he founded The Page, a site devoted to on-line literature, reviews and poetry, which he edited until 2009. (The site continues under the lively stewardship of John McAuliffe and others at the Centre for New Writing, Manchester University.) Johnston's double-sestina, 'The Sunflower', is deservedly considered one of the best New Zealand poems of recent years (it can be read in full here.

June 29, 2014

A Life Blighted by Pythons

waiting at the bus-stopall I can think aboutis how my hovercraft is full of eels

but it’s not, of course it’s notmy hovercraft is practically emptymy eels are few

in fact they’re not eels at allbut a netload of whitebaitand it isn’t even a hovercraft

I've never owned a hovercraft in my lifeI wouldn’t know what to do with oneit’s not even a dinghy

it’s a reusable eco-friendly shopping bagand they’re definitely not eelsand not even whitebait

the truth is, I've never been whitebaitingthey’re just vegetablesand I only have one thing to say:

your eelsmy hovercraftnow, baby, now

-- Janis Freegard

Based in Wellington, New Zealand, Janis Freegard has a background in botany and the natural sciences--territories her poems are intent on celebrating, excavating, reconfiguring and subverting. 'A Life Blighted by Pythons' is from her first collection, Kingdom Animalia, published by Auckland University Press in 2011. Within the zoo-like enclosure of that book, she collects and catalogues numerous species, inspired by the Swedish naturalist and 'Father of Taxonomy', Carolus Linnaeus (1707-78), about whom Freegard writes on her blog. Like the most interesting bestiaries of past eras, her poems tell us more about the human condition than they do about the natural world of which humanity is a part. What exactly is going on in Freegard's 'blighted life'? A Freudian psychologist would have a field day with her ensemble of snakes and hovercraft. Is the poem propelled by love or lust or neurosis? Or is it simply the product of a hyperactive imagination? For the record, there are no species of snakes living in the wild in New Zealand, although there are a great many eels. And there are no public hovercrafts; the only examples are in the service of eccentric millionaires.

June 22, 2014

The fire alarm sound: is given as a howling sound. Do not use the lifts. The optimism sound: is given as the sound of a man brushing his teeth. Do not go to bed. The respectability sound: is given as a familiar honking sound. Do not run, do not sing. The dearly-departed sound: is given as a rumble in the bones. Do not enter the coffin. The afterlife sound: is given as the music of the spheres. It will not reconstruct. The bordello sound: is given as a small child screaming. Do not turn on the light. The accident sound: is given as an ambulance sound. You can hear it coming closer, do not crowd the footpaths. The execution sound: is given as the sound of prayer. Oh be cautious, do not stand too near

or you will surely hear: the machinegun sound, the weeping mother sound, the agony sound, the dying child sound: whose voice is already drowned by the approaching helicopter sound: which is given as the dead flower sound, the warlord sound, the hunting and fleeing and clattering sound, the amputation sound, the bloodbath sound, the sound of the President quietly addressing his dinner; now he places his knife and fork together (a polite and tidy sound) before addressing the nation

and making a just and necessary war sound: which is given as a freedom sound (do not cherish memory): which is given as a security sound: which is given as a prisoner sound: which is given again as a war sound: which is a torture sound and a watchtower sound and a firing sound: which is given as a Timor sound: which is given as a decapitation sound (do not think you will not gasp tomorrow): which is given as a Darfur sound: which is given as a Dachau sound: which is given as a dry river- bed sound, as a wind in the poplars sound: which is given again as an angry god sound:

which is here as a Muslim sound: which is here as a Christian sound: which is here as a Jewish sound: which is here as a merciful god sound: which is here as a praying sound; which is here as a kneeling sound: which is here as a scripture sound: which is here as a black-wing sound: as a dark-cloud sound: as a black-ash sound: which is given as a howling sound: which is given as a fire alarm sound:

which is given late at night, calling you from your bed (do not use the lifts): which is given as a burning sound, no, as a human sound, as a heartbeat sound: which is given as a sound beyond sound: which is given as the sound of many weeping: which is given as an entirely familiar sound, a sound like no other, up there high in the smoke above the stars

Bill Manhire

~

Bill Manhire's Selected Poems appeared earlier this year from Carcanet (UK) and from Victoria University Press (NZ), a few months earlier. Included in that collection, 'Hotel Emergencies' was written in 2004, at the height of the Iraq conflict. The poem is just as poignant ten years later. Most of the time, Bill Manhire (born 1946) is a poet of the lilting, if often disconcerting, personal lyric. Among his influences are an unconventional upbringing in public hotels around the remote New Zealand province of Southland, his early studies of Icelandic literature, and a wide-ranging attentiveness which has brought him into fruitful collaborations with visual artists including Ralph Hotere (1931-2013) and with numerous composers--most recently, Norman Meehan (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1D9zKYfBxo). With its sense of public urgency and its almost panicked delivery, 'Hotel Emergenices' is uncharacteristically direct in its engagement with the socio-political world, yet the form of intimate address and the graceful accumulation of details is typical of Manhire's poetry.

Beginning this week, Gregory O'Brien will be curating a weekly series featuring poets of New Zealand. Poet, essayist, artist and curator Gregory O'Brien was born in Matamata, New Zealand, in 1961. His most recent collections of poetry are 'Beauties of the Octagonal Pool' (Auckland University Press 2012) and a collaboration with photographer Bruce Foster, 'Citizen of Santiago' (Trapeze 2013). He is a regular contributor to the UK journal PN Review. Carcanet (Manchester) has published two of his books, 'Days Beside Water' (1994) and 'News of the Swimmer Reaches Shore' (2007). In 1996 he co-edited the Oxford University Press Anthology of New Zealand Poetry (in English). O'Brien is a full-time writer and artist based in Wellington. Find out more about Gregory here.